Current Events

Part of the reason I blog is because I'd like to leave something for posterity. The way that kids find bundles of letters that their parents write, and it changes the way that they think about them. Like they're real people, in a way they couldn't appreciate before.

But I don't change a whole lot, and I think it's good to talk about current events sometimes. I have no doubt that we're going through some historically significant changes in the development of the internet, the concepts of privacy, and the degree to which things can be automated, and what that means for people and economies.

So, just some notes on what's been going on, as I understand them, and what I think about it.

Open Internet

There's a bunch of nonsense going on right now with internet service providers lobbying against legislation that would prevent them from arbitrary throttling. This is generally referred to as "net neutrality", but there's some push to call it the more polarizing and intuitive "open internet".

In particular, there's a dispute going on between Netflix (a content provider) and Verizon (an ISP). They both blame each other for network issues, the net result of which is poor streaming quality for end users. ISPs in general seem to be complaining about Netflix being the source of a huge percentage share of total network traffic, and they think that Netflix should be paying more because of it.

This kind of stuff blows my mind. Netflix is giving ISP customers a consistent reason to subscribe to overpriced broadband services, but it's not enough for the ISPs. They want to charge Netflix extra, too.

Verizon seems particularly bad. My understanding is that they're basically demanding tribute from Netflix to not throttle the connection right at the end of the line, via a peering agreement. The congestion appears to be intentional on Verizon's part. They're currently getting away with this, but a lot of the public is pressuring the FCC to classify these broadband providers as title 2 common carriers.

This would allow for extra government regulations and consumer protections. In a lot of the country right now, there are a lot of areas where it seems the ISPs have worked out cartel agreements to stay out of each other's turf, such that they're allowed to have local monopolies. Consumers who want broadband frequently just have one option.

This makes sense. Broadband internet requires a lot of physical infrastructure (cables, relays, etc.), which makes an ISP a natural monopoly. In essence, it would generally be a really inefficient use of resources to lay redundant cables so that ISPs could compete in an area.

The problem is that all of the arguments that the ISPs are putting forth against it complain about how it would ruin their competitive advantages and ability to recoup expenditures to build their networks. These same ISPs have generally received huge sums of money from government agencies (i.e. taxpayers) to build out these networks, and have largely underdelivered in these agreements.

Holders of monopolies have a vested interest against the introduction of any kind of competition, and it's hard not to see Verizon's throttling of Netflix traffic as a direct affront to competition, given that Verizon owns Red Box, which competes with Netflix.

Without regulations, what I think you'll generally see is that any local competitors that try to spring up, because of poor customer satisfaction with current options, will be squashed by the existing telecom giant in the area. Suddenly, they'll be able to offer lower prices and higher bandwidth, and they'll race the upstart to the bottom, until they can't sustain a business anymore and are driven out. Then they'll jack the prices back up and it's business as usual for a monopoly holder.

I think this is a no brainer. I believe they're already classified as public utilities, and if that's the case, and they're receiving taxpayer subsidies, they have to be better regulated.

Privacy

The Snowden leaks, for whatever you'd like to argue their practical effect has been thusfar, have been instrumental in changing the conversation. People talking about the government conducting mass surveilance on the citizenry can no longer be dismissed as conspiracy theorists.

It's happening. It's happening on a disgustingly large scale. It shits all over our fourth ammendment rights. It's god damn embarrassing.

There's clear law against warrantless wiretapping. The government isn't allowed to listen in on your conversations without consent, or a warrant founded in evidence to suggest wrongdoing.

What the NSA is doing, to circumvent the letter of the law, is just collecting all of the conversations, but claiming it's not a breach until they listen to it. So, when and if they get a warrant, they can go to their archive and listen to every conversation you've had for however long they've been collecting.

They also have a bullshit rubber stamp secret court that just hands out whatever warrants they request, and they're clearly able to be compromised by whatever curious techs they have on staff.

The potential for arbitrary blackmail here is staggering, and probably lets the NSA do whatever they want without fear of retaliation from things like congress or the supreme court.

We've become one of those countries with secret police that run roughshod over your personal liberties that we used to make fun of.

It's not funny anymore.

It's hard to call for action here without just sounding like a terrorist. e.g. I think the facility that they use to store all of these conversations should be burned to the ground. But I can't suggest anyone do that, because it's a government facility or something. Except it would be like the most patriotic thing I think you could do right now. Irony.

What really bothers me, though, is that there's no way to process all of that information and do anything meaningful with it. I think they're using it for drug busts or something, but if they want to prevent terrorist activity, I don't think there's any way to use that resource effectively. It's too much to sort through.

Automation

I think Americans have suffered a lot as a result of free trade agreements, effectively making Americans, with a high cost of living, compete with people making slave wages somewhere else in the world. People talk a lot about how these factory workers make like pennies per hour, but at the same time, they're not dealing with American rent seekers, and their dollar goes further.

In a lot of America, it's straight up impossible to support yourself on minimum wage. People are living with their parents, or rooming with friends, unable to buy anything they can own, because they can't save anything. There's heavy reliance on government support programs. They hand you government assistance application forms with your Walmart employment forms. It's really disgusting.

I think that situation sucks, and it's easy to complain about free trade agreements, but we also have an unprecedented ability to automate work, which would have driven those people out of jobs just the same.

I always say that in a world where they're making robots to do everything, you want to be the guy making the robots if you want job security. I'm a programmer, and aspiring inventor, so I feel relatively secure in my future. But I have future survivor's guilt. I don't want to just march on with a comfortable life when so many people are being abused and suffering.

In the long term, we're either going to overpopulate ourselves to death, or I think we're heading to post-scarcity. Either way, those jobs are gone, and they're not coming back. Long term, people are going to have to learn new skills to be relevant. I'd love to see a surge of scientists, personally.

But in the short term, people are hurting. They're struggling for basic needs, and they feel ashamed, and hopeless. Companies are focusing relentlessly on short term profit, rather than any kind of long term stability, so they churn through workers, exploiting sad and desperate people.

In America, there's been systematic union busting for decades. I think labor organization would go a long way to reinvigorating the middle class, but I don't know that the traditional union is the answer.

Corporations have gotten huge, and they've become international entities. A union of people in some factory can't effectively demand anything. For one, there are tons of people who'd love to have any job. People who've been beaten down for years. Second, if the local environment is hostile, the corporation can just pick up and leave, leaving destabilized, broken towns behind.

I think to have leverage against these huge entities, you need higher order organization. The kind of thing where you can rally all of the low level workers across the globe. But we have the tech for this now.

I've thought about this a fair bit. I think it could effectively be done with something that's basically Kickstarter, but for strikes. Demands are established (probably tailored for local levels, and then packaged together), and people pledge to participate in the strike, but nobody does until a critical mass is reached.

e.g. A company like Walmart, the archetypal evil corporation, will generally just close down a location instead of pay their employees a living wage. Walmart employs something like 2.2 million people worldwide. Say, 2 million of those are floor staff. If you could get 1 million of them to pledge to strike, that's not something that can be brushed off.

They have to pay overhead costs on land leases, or property tax, and for utilities on whatever lots their stores operate on. These are offset by income streams that wouldn't come with not enough staff to run a store. Walmart operates on fairly tight margins and makes up for it in scale. But small local losses, at scale, are crushing losses.

It's not a big deal to organize some temp workers to fill vacancies you know are coming at a specific location due to a local union strike, but if all you know is that a million people are striking tomorrow, how could you prepare for that?

I don't know that you could. I kind of worry that, if implemented effectively, this would be too effective, and you'd just nuke the crap out of the business landscape. I'm not positive this is a bad thing, but I worry it would perpetuate that story of the evil, lazy union, and ultimately lead to reduced workers' rights. Say you could bring Walmart to its knees, why not demand more? Who's safe at that point?

I worry it's too strong of a weapon, in the hands of downtrodden people, who couldn't use it rationally, free from the emotion of their situation. At the same time, I don't know if a company like Walmart can be negotiated and adjusted onto a righteous path. Maybe they just need to be straight up replaced by people committed to ethical treatment of workers.

It strikes me an inefficient use of resources, though. A waste of established logistics and infrastructure. But it's entirely possible that one stop megamart systems only work when you're exploiting your labor, and wouldn't be able to compete with local, smaller businesses otherwise. Maybe even likely.

In other news, I got a Costco membership, and it makes me really happy.